Live from SIGGRAPH

Since SIGGRAPH 2007 a lot has happened for me. For instance: yesterday was my first day of teaching at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. And will start at Montclair State University in a little over a week. So I still didn't get to blogging about this years annual SIGGRAPH conference. Jared Bendis, even though his visit to San Diego was a stop on his way to Africa, posted an obscene amount of photos here, including a not too flattering photo of yours truly he took real early on day 4. Here's an image I took of him late on the Friday before the conference. The gentleman on the right in Thierry Frey, ACM SIGGRAPH director for Information Services

Hmmm, it was probably not really late when this picture was taken. Even though the time stamp says 11:43 I left my camera on Eastern Time. Having just flown in it was late for me though

Live Sand Animation

Here is some great real time animation found on YouTube: sand animation performed live. I guess the performance was given at the opening of the SICAF festival in 2003

Would those in the audience taking pictures of the screen actually have thought that using a flash and drowning out the image would give them a good result

You can find the same clip on Google Video

Back to Lightwave

In 1999, when I was a T.A. at Ohio State, I taught a class in Computer Animation using Lightwave. This Fall, I will dive into that program once more, for again I will be teaching a 3D class using it. On the right you see a brilliant image from a little animation of a poorly modeled, I mean: artistically simplified jumping rabbit I used to explain renderpasses back in 1999

I guess this will put my Blender experiment on hold for a bit (I just hit a wall there anyway, since I have not been able to figure out yet how to animate shader parameters) but look here soon for great images created in Lightwave!

Nomen est omen

Here's one only Dutch people will understand: watching NOW the name of a janitor turned union activist put a smile on my face. His last name: "Arbogast".

Macbook Chipped

Maybe I'm using my Macbook too much. Where I tend to rest my right wrist, the cover is now chipped. A tiny sliver hanging on to the rest of the top layer. I sellotaped it for now (or magictaped rather, since I'm in the States), and already bought Instant Krazy Glue at Kmart.

How fast one can get dependent upon technology! Until my wife gave me this laptop for my birthday last december, I could get by without a portable computer no problem. Now I really cannot bring it it for repairs (it still is within warranty) because I NEED it!

Putin Jugend

This New York Times video is quite scary: it shows a Kremlin orchestrated youth organization in Russia, waving flags and wearing uniforms. Ok, they might not yet wear uniforms but apparently they already formed some sort of militia.

Curly Things

After returning from the annual SIGGRAPH conference last week, I really wanted to blog about what I saw there. Posted some image on my Flickr page but got sucked into the production vortex at Mechanism Digital pretty fast.

Since I am commuting again this week I tinkered a bit more with Blender on the train. The line that my Python script creates now does a better job and not intersecting with itself. Some more tweaking and I will move on to figuring out how I am going to animate this.

Lol bike

Had been pointed Lolcats by a friend a while ago (he has two cats) but this image is just great!

I was wondering if, since I come from a dog family (my mom is mad about dogs), anybody created loldogs yet. Yes, someone did. Yawn...

Plane Render

It's that time of year: I'm off to attend the annual conference of ACM SIGGRAPH, held this year in San Diego, California. I'm on a couple of committees so I'll be pretty busy. But good busy. I've been preparing DVD's for the International Services and the Chapters Party and if you will be at SIGGRAPH this year there's a good chance you will find me in what is called the SIGGRAPH Village

The seats are pretty crammed on this plane I am on now (no, I will not be able to post to this blog untill back on the ground), but I managed to squeeze my macbook between me and the reclined seet in front of me. Been playing around with Python in Blender for a while, mainly while on the train to and from New York. And now I finally have an image to show for it. I'm generating a line that revolves around a central point but tries not to intersect with itself. To see if that could generate some nice imagery. Yes, just tinkering. Not quite there yet, the line still occasionally eats it's tail. And have not worked on the shading at all.